Aren't there cases where people would -not- want the queue to be
cleared?

Why *do* you want the queue to be cleared? (avoiding NIC /dev/null is
only reason right?)

TCP (AIUI) has its owns means to resend.

Most (all?) other transports have *never* had an expectation of such
reliability. Applications *know* they have to provide their own
reliability. Queueing and later sending (by then) stale packets is
*bad*

Why queue packets on behalf of applications which have no expectation
of kernel doing this (any application expecting such is certainlty
broken) and which very likely implement their own reliability or
packet-loss recovery strategies? Particularly when queueing is quite
possibly *detrimental* to what the application is trying to achieve
(timely sending of packets).

If an application wants reliable sending of packets, it will be using
TCP..

Jeff

regards,
--
Paul Jakma paul@xxxxxxxx paul@xxxxxxxxx Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
When the speaker and he to whom he is speaks do not understand, that is
metaphysics.
-- Voltaire